Published Apr 29, 2026, 8:00 PM EDT Jeff's been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system administration, network administration, and consulting roles. He holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master's degree in English with a focus on professional writing and editing, and another Master's degree in Computing & Information Systems. After teaching university English and computer science for a few years, Jeff launched his writing career . He's written for Macworld , Tom's Hardware , groovyPost , The Mac Observer , and more before beginning here at XDA. A Raspberry Pi still makes sense in plenty of home lab setups, especially when the job is small, quiet, and specific. I’ve used them for exactly that kind of work, and I still like the idea of a cheap board handling one clean responsibility without taking over the whole shelf. The problem is that my home lab stopped being that simple a while ago.…